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Fulfilling My Calling

 For years now, I have always felt as if God was pushing me in the direction of using my skills at writing to glorify Him.  I have dillied and I have dallied but after a good build up of time, I usually watch my ethusiasm turn into something else and I move on, never fulfilling whatever purpose I was called to take on.  

Flash forward to this summer and I have all this free time, I am encouraged and I look up to several of my friends from church doing this same thing: writing to help others come closer to the Lord.  They write for CRNA Moms (that's a fancy medical term for anesthisiolgist I think), everyday women, and adults in general.  But my expertise has always been talking to teenagers.  

I love middle school and high school students and their zest for life. Where they run ethusiastically into life and I remember my run and it was more like a dead sprint into some of the worst habits and terrible evils that I could line myself up with.  I have always felt like all of my life expereience has to be for something (hello Romans 8:28) and I was confirmed of this calling 100% this past year.   This year, in my day to day job of school librarian and lover of awesomeness, I was thrown so many curveballs, left hooks, jabs....it felt like I couldn't win for losing.  And it was in walking day to day with my students.  Between trying to fit in, first relationships, social media pitfalls, suicidal thoughts, depression, issues with drugs and alcohol, they truly sought advice from me and I truly cried out to God in hopes that I could mentor them in a way that they could understand, trust, and gain spiritual wisdom from.  I hope I succeeded now that most of them have moved on to a new school but I felt most like myself when I was doing this.  

It finally made sense how God wanted me to take all the bad things that I had done in my life and to use those experiences, those tales of triumph over death, those horrible decisions, to glorify the God Almighty that saved me from those demons and from myself, giving me new life eternal.  (That's not to say ALL my decisions were bad.  I did make some pretty good ones along the way too.)

So this blog...page...whatever the young whippersnappers are calling it these days...it's for them.  It's for parents who are trying to understand where their teenagers are coming from.  It's for the freshman in high school who feels like perhaps life would be better if they weren't in it (news flash...not true).  It's going to be raw.  It's going to be interesting.  But it will be the real deal because if I have learned anything in the twenty years I have working with teenagers...they know the difference between fake adults and real adults.  So, welcome to the real deal.

--- Wilkes

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